Empyrean Iris Story Collection

Storm of Ice

"Are you going to bother telling me where we are going?" Krill wondered examining the camera feed from the hull of the ship and out into the vast darkness of space.

Compared to what he was used to, this part of space was relatively empty, no nebulae, no ice fields, and only the distant arm of a spiral galaxy to add light to their movement.

The captain waved a dismissive hand, "Oh, nowhere important." Krill panned the camera around to face forward watching as the bright yellow of a terribly average star winked at them from the darkness. As fast as they were going, the star ahead slowly began to expand.

"Initiating breaking sequence, Captain." One of the crewmen announced.

Krill panned the camera a little further to their right and watched in mild awe as the gas giant grew large in his vision dwarfing its moons a thousand times over. Bands of wind spun upon its surface varying from different shades of red and cream. They entered the pull of the gas giant at just the proper angle to cut across its field and around slowing all the while form the resistance of its gravity before continuing off into space and towards that average main sequence star expanding in the camera's lens. Expanding much slower now that they had decreased their speed.

A couple of ships detached from the hull as they passed the next planet over.

Krill panned the camera over again in time to see the dark side of a planet winking at him with a thousand distant lights.

"Where are we, Captain?"

"Oh, that, just a midsized human colony."

The ship was forced to turn following in a circular arc around the sun as they raced towards the next planet, a distant speck in the vastness of space barely visible against the light of the sun.

The captain took place at the helm and manually began slowing the ship even further. He wouldn't have risked doing the same thing as fast as they had been going earlier, but now he was able to bring the ship to a slow drift as they approached the planet. Despite the captain's wishes, Krill moved over to the navigation console and seated himself bringing up the current statistics on the system.

"Main sequence star eight planets."

"Nine."

"Sorry what?"

The Captain cleared his throat... nothing I uh.... Nothing." Though Krill could still detect a hint of annoyance on the man's face. He wondered what that was all about.

"Home to A class C habitable planet, with terraforming, and a class A-7 death planet." He went quiet, "Captain, we aren't visiting another death planet are we?"

The captain's grin was barely visible at this angle, but Krill swore he could still see it, "You know me to well."

Kill groaned inwardly pulling up the statistics on this supposed death planet, when he received an error message, he switched to a quick planet wide scan.

"Um, Captain, I really don't think we want to be here. This planet is terribly unstable. The volcanic activity alone make it uninhabitable. I mean the crust MOVES and shifts and breaks apart causing terrible earthquakes. This planet has hundreds of earthquakes every minute some of them large enough to topple mountains. There are at most 1,500 active volcanoes and at least 20 right now that are ERRUPTING. And that doesn't even begin to cover the sheer mass of wind storms, and electrical storms captain..... LIGHTNING ON A PLANET. Don't you think that is a bit extreme? It gets even worse, it gets so cold here that water crystalizes in the atmosphere and falls as ice."

Frustratingly, the more he talked, the larger the human's smile grew.

He clearly wasn't understanding the dangers, so Krill continued, "Its highest recorded temperature was 134 degrees, captain, a little more than halfway to boiling." When that elicited only laughter he continued, "The lowest recorded temperature was -128 degrees"